The cooler’s contact surface is flat but the thermal grease imprint suggests that it doesn’t press down on the CPU uniformly.

It must be due to the fastening mechanism, which isn’t very strong. Anyway, the cooler covers most of the CPU’s heat-spreader surface.

The Scythe Katana 4 is equipped with one 7-blade 92x25mm PWM-regulated fan.

Judging by the shape of the blades, it is a Kama Flow 2 fan but its marking differs from what we can see at the company's official website: SY9225SL12M-P. The fan’s rotation speed is regulated automatically in a range of 300 to 2500 RPM to produce an air flow of 6.7 to 55.6 CFM and static pressure of 0.75 to 2.29 mm of water at 7.2 to 31.3 dBA of noise. The heatsink allows installing a second 92mm fan but no fasteners are included in the box for it. The service life of the fan’s sleeve bearing is not specified.

Notwithstanding its inexpensiveness, the Scythe Katana 4 can be installed on any modern platform. It supports older mainboards for Intel’s LGA775 and AMD’s Socket 754/939/940 processors, so it’s a truly universal cooler. Its installation procedure is detailed in the following video:

The process is very simple. You begin by attaching mounting brackets to the cooler's base:

AMD | Intel 775/1155(6)/1366

Intel LGA 2011

And then you just mount the cooler and lock its steel or plastic fasteners. If you’ve got an LGA2011 platform, the cooler is secured with screws.

Screws are preferable in terms of pressure force and reliability, but as you’ve seen in the photo of the thermal grease imprint above, they don’t always ensure perfect fastening.

The gap between the bottom fin of the Scythe Katana 4 and the mainboard is 42 millimeters, which is quite enough to avoid conflicts with tall heatsinks on power components or memory modules.